• Summary:
This article evaluates the class and racial attitudes of four
European women who lived on the Eastern Cape frontier
between 1843 and 1878. Their cultural baggage included a rigid
sense of class structures which defined relationships between
people and especially that of master and servant. The women
came from the middle class and there is no indication that they
were prepared to accept the more egalitarian conditions which
they experienced on the frontier. Their racial prejudices were
bound up with their class ideologies and religious beliefs. Hence
they retained a sense of European superiority and bias against
the "heathen", but their contact with the indigenous people did
modify their views slightly.